Goals: Since its predecessors gave NASA all the data needed for the upcoming Apollo missions, Surveyor 7 was dedicated to purely scientific investigation. It was to land and take pictures in different terrain from the other Surveyors and conduct various experiments on the lunar soil.

Accomplishments: Surveyor 7 was the only spacecraft in this series to land in the lunar highland region, where it took more than 21,000 photos (many in stereo), used an alpha-scattering instrument to analyze the components of the soil and conducted at least 16 surface-bearing tests. Its TV camera registered 2 lasers aimed at it from observatories in California and Arizona, demonstrating that lasers could be used to precisely measure the distance between Earth and the Moon, as was ultimately done using reflectors installed on the Moon by Apollo and Soviet Lunokhod missions.